Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. Current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form in this special issue, and directly compared and discussed in a lively debate, reported at the end of each chapter. The main results are reported in the editors’ introduction.

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical (...) word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings. (shrink)

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a (...) set of variables and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the metaphoric structure of five artistic paintings within “Think aloud” protocols, in which a group of 14 English speakers with a low self-rated level of expertise in art and history of art expertise were asked to verbalize all their thoughts, ideas and impressions of the artworks. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) multiple interpretations for the same artwork are possible, (2) the interpretations of the metaphorical structures described (...) by the participants often diverge from those advanced by the researchers. These findings challenge the methods by which metaphor identification and analysis in pictorials is currently approached. As a matter of fact, most of the research in pictorial metaphors tends to reduce stimuli such as artistic paintings to unique metaphoric interpretations generally produced by a single researcher by means of introspection. By addressing this methodological problem in metaphor research, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical and operational participant-based framework that takes into account the role of metaphoric conceptualization within the domain of art and art cognition. (shrink)

Metaphors can provide a conceptual framework for understanding complex topics and as such, they have frequently been used in COVID-19 discourse. As previous research indicates that conceptual metaphors can influence how people reason about complex topics, the metaphors used to communicate about the pandemic can influence how it is understood and how people respond. This paper investigates the influence of metaphorical framing on emotions and reasoning. An experimental study compares BATTLE and JOURNEY metaphor frames in a hypothetical text (adapted from (...) previous studies) about the pandemic. Our aim is to examine the influence of these frames on readers’ affective state, inferences about the attitudes of others and suggestions to stop the virus from spreading. The results suggest that compared to JOURNEY metaphors, BATTLE metaphors can negatively influence affective state and may influence people to suggest more restrictive solutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Yet, metaphors were not found to influence reasoning about the attitudes of others. We interpret these results in relation to previous studies, suggesting that metaphors may influence emotions and reasoning in some ways only. The results have implications for public communication surrounding the pandemic. Limitations and avenues for future research are discussed. (shrink)

What is the relation between the three following elements: words, pictures, and conceptual representations? And how do these three elements work, in defining and explaining metaphors? These are the questions that we tackle in our interdisciplinary contribution, which moves across cognitive linguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy and semiotics. Within the cognitive linguistic tradition, scholars have assumed that there are equivalent and comparable structures characterizing the way in which metaphor works in language and in pictures. In this paper we analyze contextual visual (...) metaphors, which are considered to be the most complex ones, and we compare them to those that in language are called indirect metaphors. Our proposal is that a syllogistic mechanism of comprehension permeates both metaphors expressed in the verbal modality as well as metaphors expressed in the pictorial modality. While in the verbal modality the metaphoric syllogism is solved by inference, we argue that in the pictorial modality the role of inference is performed through mental imagery. (shrink)

Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic (...) contexts. By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience. (shrink)